‘Smoke Alarm’ Caramel Chocolates

The discovery of GOLD ganache led to the plan to make chocolates based on this filling. It has the reminiscence of Caramac bars which I love.

What we did

I used milk chocolate as I thought this would go best with a comforting caramel ganache filling. I haven’t used milk in a long while and wanted to play with my power flowers. I split 500g tempered chocolate in two bowls and used half a flower of red and blue each to see how powerful these would be. While you could see a red tinge, the blue made the chocolate look more like sludge than anything else. Decided to pour them both in the same bowls and then straight over the chocolate moulds to fill in hope that they create some form of marble effect with a slight red and sludge coloured tinge. I used my new fancy swirly mould and the frog moulds we got ages ago in a nod to Harry Potter’s chocolate frogs. I polished the moulds with food grade alcohol and sprayed with lustre in pink, gold and silver.

We recently treated ourselves to Samin Nosrat’s book SALT, FAT, ACID & HEAT and so far loved every recipe we tried from this cooking bible. We were waiting for a good opportunity to try her Salted Caramel Sauce recipe and this would be the day! The dark, almost burn caramel sauce should go very nicely with the smooth, sweet GOLDen chocolate ganache. The recipe does state it should reach smoke alarm stage and it did. Very near burnt but with a good pinch of sea salt and some vanilla extract it lifted the caramel to a yummy and addictive gooey sauce that nearly didn’t make it anywhere but straight to our tummies.

For the GOLD ganache, I used 200g GOLD chocolate with 125g whipping cream as I wanted it quite soft set to better go with the caramel sauce. I added a splash of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt before filling it in one my squeeze bottles. I filled the shells with the caramel sauce last night and let it set overnight in the fridge. So today I just poured over the ganache and back in the fridge to set before capping.

The capping itself was a nightmare. I was expecting it to be for the chocolate frogs mould but they came out fairly easily and only two were bruised. The new swirly mould though… Initially 6 popped out, then 1 at a time… but only 9 in total out of 24 or so. Scraped, banged and then ended up putting it in the freezer which made it eventually seize enough to come out.

OUr verdict

Apart from the de-moulding drama, the flavours were AMAZING! The slightly bitter caramel and the sweet ganache balanced each other out perfectly! I managed to get the consistency evenly on both fillings as well, so it just a perfect match. I was very happy with these, and definitely want to make them again.

what we would do differently

For starters work on the tempering of the chocolate better! I don’t want to change much on the flavour of the ganache nor the caramel, but want to try how it tastes enrobed in dark chocolate. Might be a slightly more decadent flavour especially for those that might not like milk chocolate.

I recently starting playing with iMovie, so I made a little trailer about the above experience. Not sure if WordPress will let me upload videos though. If not find us on Instagram @palace__kitchen